


The Most Happy

by reine_des_corbeaux



Category: History Boys - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Rewrite, F/F, History as Metaphor, Hopeful Ending, Other, Post-Canon, Rule 63, Timeskip, anne boleyn - Freeform, gratuitous Shakespeare references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2019-08-27
Packaged: 2020-09-28 04:28:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20419913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reine_des_corbeaux/pseuds/reine_des_corbeaux
Summary: Dakin tests her theory of subjunctive history as a student, while Irwin tests it years later.





	The Most Happy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reconditarmonia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reconditarmonia/gifts).

_Ainsi sera, groigne qui groigne_

_—Motto of Anne Boleyn_

Dakin takes one last moment to squint at herself in the mirror, and run her fingers through her hair. She’s been waiting, planning, all morning and all afternoon for this moment, imagining herself as an explorer, a scholar testing a theory. Testing _her _theory. Her heart pounds against her chest, but she steels herself, remembers who she is. She checks her smile in classroom windows all the way down the hall from the toilets to Miss Irwin’s drab little classroom. 

By the time she gets to the door, her shot nerves have knit themselves together again, and she does a little shimmy of sorts, as if to bring courage to every part of her soul.  
“But lend and give where she is sure to lose,” Dakin mutters to herself, and in her mind, she kicks herself for it, for the sheer defeatist hopelessness inherent in the bluntness of words like “lend” and “sure” and “lose”. 

She’s never been one for Shakespeare, not really, not except for _All’s Well _and Helena. Helena, who knows what she wants, and who gets it. Helena, who walks into a war zone to find and marry the person she wants, seems aspirational to Sophie Dakin. She’s often thought of herself as Helena in her more fanciful moods, making her goals and aspirations Bertram. There have been many Bertrams over the years (good exam results, Fiona, an Oxford offer) and she’s plowed through all the obstacles to get them all. Irwin is just one more, so how to explain the jitters? Why is there a quiver in her hands? Dakin stills her fluttering fingers, and pushes the door open. 

Miss Irwin is tidying her classroom, not that it needs to be tidied. It’s sterile and bland- gray walls, gray carpeting, gray sky outside the windows, the heaviness of rain moistening the air leaking in through the windows. 

Dakin grins, and twines a lock of permed hair around one finger, seeing herself as every sordid schoolgirl fantasy at once. But Miss Irwin, of the sensible shoes and sensible glasses and quiet, dark clothing, looks over at her with no malice, no confusion. 

“Yes?” she asks, a bland tone in her voice that nearly wilts all the resolve from Dakin’s step. 

They stand, watching each other closely, for a few excruciating seconds. Then Dakin lets the silence drop, and drops the innocent-decadent act. She doesn’t know why she expected it to work. Miss Irwin’s read her essays, and though all of them were filled with pretty coached lies, the honesty spread thin over the neat words and provocative opinions, there’s intimacy in red ink, the communion of words with words. 

Dakin leans against the table, trying to look languid, but stumbling a little, and when she catches herself, she wishes she had unbuttoned the top buttons of her shirt, flashed a bit of cleavage in Miss Irwin’s direction as she fell. And all the while, Irwin watches, sphinx-like, more magisterial than any teacher, particularly a glorified supply teacher, has any right to be. 

“I was thinking,” Dakin said, “about our chat.” 

Miss Irwin arches an eyebrow. 

“Which one? We’ve had so many.” 

“You know what I mean. Subjunctive history. Past, present, future, and what might have been.” 

“Ah, yes, that.” 

“Well-” and here’s the gamble, here’s the leap of faith-- “I realize I was terribly rude. Didn’t provide a single example. And then, I was thinking-” 

“Really?” Irwin interjects, her tone arch, her eyebrow still infuriatingly quirked-_those glasses. _

“Yes, really. Isn’t that what bright young women are supposed to do? I do have fun too, you know, but thinking’s nice sometimes. When I’m not doing other things.” 

Dakin hopes she’s sounding suggestive, but Irwin’s face doesn’t change. 

“Anyhow,” she goes on, “I was thinking about the Dissolution of the Monasteries.” 

“Really?” Miss Irwin asks again. “I thought the First World War made more of an impression on your group.” 

“That was more on Mrs. Hector’s end, really. She mentioned Woolf and Timms asked a pointed question or three about Radclyffe Halland it was all over from there on.” 

Miss Irwin, admirably, doesn’t say anything. Dakin supposes that it’s too much to hope that she’ll jump up proclaiming strong positive feelings on _The Well of Loneliness_, or ask if Hector said anything about Vita Sackville-West. On the other hand, Dakin read _The Well _at sixteen, declared it “a Well of Boredom”, and has never understood Hector’s slavish devotion to the book, too put off by Stephen Gordon’s misery. Besides, her heart lies with history. 

“Ah,” Irwin says after a moment. “So, the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Go on.” 

Always this teacherly mask, but already the cracks are showing. Dakin presses on. 

“You really did teach us well, when you talked about it, but I think you forgot something. Or rather, someone.” 

“Someone?” 

“Anne Boleyn. Second wife of Henry VIII, mother of Elizabeth…”  
“Yes, I know who Anne Boleyn is.” There’s an edge of exasperation in Irwin’s voice. “But why Anne?” 

Dakin smiles. 

“It’s history in the subjunctive all over again. Would Henry have broken from the Catholic Church if Anne became his mistress and didn’t hold out for a crown? Would she have sunk easily into the tides of history with her sister and Bessy Blount?” 

“Generally, that is what happens. To women like her, I mean.” 

Dakin rolls her eyes. 

“Women like her?” she says, and she hopes Irwin catches the unspoken implication, the hints within the words of _women like me?_

There’s another pause, another silence. She walks closer, all urgency. 

“Anne Boleyn,” Dakin continues, “wasn’t content to just be a mistress. And she became a queen. Her waiting game paid off. She got the throne. She got the crown, and told everyone they could grumble about it, because she had what she wanted. Things worked out for her, even if she didn’t know for a fact that they would.” 

She steps closer, sees herself reflected in Irwin’s infuriating spectacles, and her fingers itch to ruffle the tidy collar of Irwin’s blouse, remove the glasses, and make something anew. 

“And she got beheaded,” Irwin says. “You’ve conveniently left that part out.” 

“Just like you left out the truth about your nonexistent Oxford days.” 

Dakin sees the shock in Irwin’s eyes, and then the understanding. They’re level again. Things are proceeding as planned. 

“I did,” she says. 

“Well, lying worked for you. You put your teaching precepts into practice. But back to Anne Boleyn. Without her, for all we know, England as we know it wouldn’t exist. The Elizabethan Age. The United Kingdom. In a way, we can thank Anne for all that. Because she knew what she wanted.” 

Dakin crosses her arms. 

“What exactly are you suggesting?” Irwin asks. 

“I’m suggesting that we get a drink.” 

“A drink?” 

“And other things.” 

There it is. The offer. The decisive moment. And Dakin knows, before the rest of it even happens, that Irwin will say yes. It’s a matter of history, and of decision, and damn all the odds, even Helena has nothing on Anne Boleyn. 

She leans back, and waits for subjunctive to become indicative. 

***

_23 Years Later _

Irwin still limps. It’s been twenty-three years since the accident, and she’s never quite healed, but she’s used to it now; used to the days when she needs a cane to keep herself moving from home to studio to wherever she happens to be moving. It helps her public persona if she appears indefatigable, bombastic, full of life and energy at every moment. Thomasina Irwin, noted TV historian, is all flashing glasses and fearless polemic. Aches and pains are alien to her. She is, many days, nothing like Tom Irwin, who even now, all these years after her Yorkshire misadventures (and can she really call them misadventures, when a crooked smile and a remembered breathless voice still drive her mad with longing on the nights when she thinks about what could have been if not for motorcycles and misconduct?), still chases the breathless euphoria of being listened to. Perhaps that’s why she’s gone into television. 

It’s raining today, but by now, the morning’s downpour has slowed to a sullen drizzle, the sodden streets lively with colored umbrellas, and Irwin steps carefully to avoid puddles. Her hip throbs, as she makes her way down the street, feeling far older than she actually is. No umbrella and late for lunch with her publicist. What a fine day this is. The rain blurs the streets, but it is a soft rain, something out of Forster or Woolf, and Irwin half-wishes she was in her twenties again, and rushing to meet someone at a museum, living a fantasy of the youthful life she didn’t have. She’d been a quiet young woman, talking only in class, and with a select few friends, all equally intense, all equally driven, all equally chilly people. 

“Miss Irwin? Miss Irwin? Is that you?”  
The voice comes floating across the traffic, across the occasional whoosh of water kicked up by cars. It’s familiar, a sound out of the past, and it sends a cold shiver down Irwin’s spine. She stops for a moment, certain it is only a fan, but TV historians don’t get paparazzi, and she has only been Dr. Irwin, or occasionally Ms. Irwin, for two decades now. Miss Irwin is a name belonging to a different Tom Irwin, a different woman entirely. Miss Irwin told students how to trick and play their way through Oxbridge entrance exams. Tom Irwin as she is now hosts documentary programming on women’s lives in English history. Anyone who knew her as Miss Irwin knew her in a different life. She stands still on the sidewalk, and looks over the tops of cars to see a woman waving. 

And then, the traffic stops, and the woman starts to run. Irwin hears the snap of a breaking heel, a muttered curse, and the achingly familiar woman bends down to pull off her shoe. She jumps and runs the rest of the way across the busy street, and suddenly, she’s standing next to Irwin, dripping, one stocking-clad foot dripping, one high-heeled shoe in her hand. 

“Remember me?” she asks. 

And Irwin finds that she both can and can’t. The woman’s eyes are arresting. Her demeanor is the same. And yet, she is older now, and names escape from Irwin, fleeing like a summer day. She pauses too long, and then she remembers, and cannot quite believe that she ever could have forgotten this face. 

“Dakin. Sophie Dakin?” 

“Sophia now,” Dakin says with a rueful smile, pushing a lock of straight hair (it had been curly, Irwin remembers, at the time of the accident). “It was always Sophia, really, but it’s easier to be a Sophie when you’re younger.” 

The change catches Irwin by the throat. So much difference in one letter. An E becomes an A, and a schoolgirl with a silly perm becomes a woman with sleek, dark hair pulled back but straggling out in the rain. She struggles to think of small talk. 

“What is it you do now?” she asks, wondering if she would have known if they’d ever met for drinks and more despite the accident. 

“Tax lawyer. There’s loads of money in it, and it’s really quite fun, as far as jobs go. Life’s been kind to me.” 

Dakin smiles again, that same sheepish, girlish smile, at odds with her sophisticated clothes. She seems regretful, as if she cannot quite believe that here they are, twenty-three years older, an ocean of time and difference separating them from the women they were when they last saw each other. 

“You know what I do,” Irwin says lamely. 

“Of course. I watch your programs, you know. It’s like being in your class again, but with more overt feminism.”  
Irwin laughs. 

“I think in a way, you girls taught me to be braver, louder. You and Mrs. Hector.” 

Mentioning Hector seems to have roughly the same effect as summoning a ghost. The smile fades from Dakin’s lips, and is replaced with something else, perhaps some great and sea-deep sorrow. 

“Do you ever wonder what would have happened if the accident hadn’t?” she asks quietly. 

“Always,” Irwin says, and then, although they’re standing on a crowded street corner, she admits it. “I still think about that last conversation we had.” 

“Anne Boleyn? Taking what you want and what you need, doing whatever it takes to get the outcome that you always wanted?” 

“Yes, that,” Irwin says. “All of that.” 

“It was childish of me,” Dakin says, “going after my teacher like that.” 

“But I wanted you too. Even if your analogy cast me as Henry VIII.” 

A smile quirks Dakin’s lips, a sparkle hides in the corners of her eyes. 

“Maybe we can both be Anne in this analogy,” she says. “Not that it matters now. But sometimes, it’s nice to wonder how it could have been. If we’d gotten that drink. If I’d kissed you. If we’d gone to bed together after all.” 

Irwin doesn’t know what to say or what to do. She’s been alone for so long, hating herself for being hung up on the could haves and would haves of a love affair from twenty years past aborted before it was begun. She’s never expected that Dakin might be wrapped in its tendrils too. 

“But Anne Boleyn was beheaded,” Irwin says, finally. “She died because she got what she wanted, in the end. Maybe it’s better that we never tried. Better to end with a whimper than a bang.” 

Dakin laughs now, and it’s a wonderful sight, Irwin thinks, this older Dakin, shoe in hand, laughing in the rain. 

“Anne died, but in a way, she got her wish too. It’s her daughter who got an era named after her, not Edward, or Mary, or poor little Lady Jane Grey. Katherine’s daughter gets remembered as a tyrant, Jane’s son was never much more than a sickly boy-king, and Elizabeth got the reign of glory. It’s Anne who got the legacy in the end. If there’s an afterlife, she’s looking down from it and having the last laugh.” 

Irwin looks at Dakin, dripping, smiling, her face an open book. 

“Are you saying that we should try this all again?” 

“I’m saying that maybe we’re not Anne at all. Maybe we’re the Elizabethan age.” 

Irwin laughs, finally, long and loud, too loud for public. 

“Are you free this evening?” she asks, and Dakin smiles. 

“Of course,” she says, and the subjunctive blooms into the future tense. 

**Author's Note:**

> Opinions voiced by the characters on literature and history in this fic are not necessarily my own (except for one of them- I can't stand _The Well of Loneliness_ any more than Dakin can, but its importance to queer female literary history in the English-speaking world can't really be overstated, and I felt weird not having it show up in the fic at all). 
> 
> That being said, I had a ton of fun working on this fic, and trying to think about the kinds of literary and historical things the characters would imprint on was a delightful challenge. The story as it exists was ultimately conceived via this bit of thought: "what British historical figure do a ton of teenage girls, regardless of sexuality, tend to like and/or imprint hard on? Anne Boleyn, of course!" Combined with canon's repeated mentions of certain events in the Tudor period, Anne Boleyn as the unifying historical metaphor seemed really fitting, and the whole thing came together. 
> 
> Other things to note: _All's Well That Ends Well_ kind of wrote itself into the fic. It wasn't intended to be there initially, but f!Dakin using Helena as inspiration seemed weirdly plausible. Therefore, the gratuitous Shakespeare showed up.
> 
> The title is, of course, Anne Boleyn's motto for her coronation. The opening quote is another one of Anne's mottoes, usually loosely translated to something like "let all those who grumble grumble. This is how it's going to be." It seemed appropriate as well. As for the specificity of the timeskip, it's also got a bit of Boleyn-y significance: Elizabeth I ascended the throne approximately 23 years after Anne Boleyn's death. 
> 
> Hope you enjoy this!


End file.
